This year, I am corning my own beef, celebrating the fact that when the Irish got to New York City, their Jewish neighbors introduced them to kosher salt and a nice brisket, and Irish promptly substituted this for the (back) bacon in their boiled dinner.

You, my friends, know this as "corned beef and cabbage".

Fun Kitchen Science Fact: corned beef is pink because of KNO3, better known as saltpetre--which has no effect on the male anatomy, although all that green beer you're swilling with it probably will. As KNO3 can be used to make things go boom, it can be difficult to acquire--I tried several stores (a pharmacy, a health food store, and my favorite occult shop) before finding it at my second favorite occult shop for $2.50/oz (limit 2 oz due to boom).

Want some? Come to Hrafnar's Lore Night on 17 March! Topic...well, topic is tbd, but wouldn't you like a nice brisket?

You will be amused -- my *first* thought upon reading this and the wiki article was -- oh, wouldn't it be fun & crazy to make some saltpetre for the Arts & Sciences competition (there is a category called 'alchemy' -- this would totally fit. The main difficulty being it would have to be for next year, and things don't rot well in this neck of the woods), and my second was the Mythbuster episode, where they demostrated that there was nothing wrong with Kirk's gunpowder, and a lot wrong with his bamboo cannon.

Yep, that's completely and totally nerdcore, and as such *stamp* I Approve.

When I saw the Mythbusters episode, it was not long after I'd seen the disc of the Star Trek reboot--which actually does some filming at The Infamous Vasquez Rocks.

Upon watching the extras and finding out what contortions are now required to film at Vasquez Rocks, I was completely unsurprised that the MB's didn't road trip it down there--disappointed, but unsurprised.

In this case, "kosher" does not directly refer to ritual cleanliness. Rather, the use of large salt flakes can help a meat become kosher, by helping to draw out the blood whose presence makes the meat unclean. This process is known as "koshering", and thus, it's "kosher salt" you use to do it with. It should probably be called "koshering salt", but nobody does.

Ah, OK, that makes sense (and yes, "cooking salt" is the same sort of thing). Linguistically that's not too unusual, it's similar to "Rich Tea Biscuits" and US "coffee cake", which don't actually contain tea or coffee but are for eating with those things. Adjectivising nouns is not considered as harmful[1] as verbing them, which weirds language...

(And then there is Worcestershire Sauce, pronounced 'wooster' and managing to ignore an internal syllable and even the whole shire...)